Another update on what’s to come

It’s been some time since my last blog post, so I thought I’d go ahead and give you some details on what’s been happening lately and what’s coming up.

What’s been up?

Well, a lot! I’ve been busy making tons of changes in Mizuu. Many of them are “under the hood” changes that’ll make it possible to do other kinds of changes.

An example of this is that I’m currently working on some database changes that’ll make it easier for me to implement a backup feature in a future version. Mizuu will now also support multiple file path mappings for single TV show episodes.

Another example is that I’ve been making some changes to how library updates are handled. This means that it’s now much simpler to add other data sources. The next version of Mizuu will support both TheTVDb and TMDb as data sources for TV shows.

And did I mention that TV show identification has been completely rewritten and is now AWESOME? Guess I didn’t. But needless to say that it is quite awesome! And it works with multi-episode files as well.

Oh – and I’ve changed the way manual identification works. Previously you could only localize content in the system language, but now you can choose between all kinds of languages. If the content isn’t available in the selected language, it’ll default back to English. Quite neat.

I’ve literally made changes to tens of thousands of lines of code in the past few months, and a lot of stuff has happened. I’ll go into great detail on everything when I release the next version. I don’t have an ETA yet, but it’ll be some time in the fall.

Moving forward…

Most of you are probably interesting in knowing what’s happening with Mizuu on Android L, Android TV and a Material Design make-over. Well, it’s moving forward. Here’s a screenshot of some of the changes:

There are a few problems, though:

It’s still not clear if the Material Design changes should be reflected on older versions of Android. If that is the case, then the Android team needs to bring some tools to make that happen. If not, it’s going to take a long time to make everything look right on both old and new devices. In short, it’s pretty hard to do that much in terms of design at this point.

Android TV requires a lot of new code in order to work properly. It will most likely take a few weeks just to get this implemented.

Android TV apps are pretty much non-existent and no one really knows what Android TV are supposed to do and how they should work. There’s a lot to figure out in this area.

Quite a bit of the stuff that Google announced at Google I/O isn’t yet available for older versions of Android because the API’s aren’t yet finished, making it hard to work with.

So… In short: I’ll do what I can at the moment. Other stuff will come after all the new stuff is available and my questions have been answered by Google.

Google TV

It’s no secret that Google TV has been rather unsuccessful. Most of the Google TV devices are running software that’s based on a 3-year old version of Android and developers haven’t had access to native development for the platform, making it impossible to create any good video player applications. To make matters even worse, these devices are using seriously outdated hardware that makes the experience quite horrible.

I have decided that the next version of Mizuu will drop support for Android versions previous to Android 4.0.3 (API level 15). There are a number of reasons why, but these are the two main ones:

Google TV is a failure (see above) and it’s hard to develop for

Android 4.0.3 will allow me to do things that weren’t possible before, including better UPnP support

This is something that I should probably have done quite some time ago, but Google TV was holding me back.

Users on Android 3.2 will still be able to download the application via Google Play and Github, but it won’t be supported after the new version is released.

Anything else?

I have undoubtedly missed something, so please let me know in the comments if you’re looking for an answer to something that wasn’t mentioned. Thanks!

I hope the internship/job works out for you Michell. You are the best developer I know. Thank you for all the hard work you have put in and continue to do so far m8 and for the help you have given me in understanding the ecosystem of Android development

Hi Michell, great to hear there’s more to come! (Although I’m quite happy with Mizuu already). It would be a shame if Google didn’t take your application quite seriously. Also: my Androids are 4.0.4 at the moment, so yay! 🙂

HI Michell, just wondering if you have any new updates on your progress, since the last news update was about a month ago. Just wondering what you have been up to! 😀 (I’m not well versed in reading github changes, so…:P)

Lol ok, will be checking out your 3.0 milestone page. Oh yes, wanted to say that Im really happy you are moving up the min android version requirement to 4.0.3. No point limiting yourself in terms of development possibility just for a few stubborn users who are still on Google TV. Really cant wait to see how Android TV turns out!!! 😀

Yeah, I agree. It’ll take some more time, though. I’ve had some personal issues for the last couple of months, but that’s seemingly over now. Also, Google just released a ton of stuff that I need to implement before releasing an update. You can check out Mizuu on Google+ for small updates 🙂